What Others are Saying about The Quiet Life
"The Quiet Life is accessible, intelligent, brilliant and enjoyable, and the title is perfectly pitched for a plot-driven book that is full of surprises. The Quiet Life stands out head and shoulders above many of the books we get sent to review. Get back to us, Adrian, if you ever need help with contracts."
Marian Keyes (Rachel's Holiday, The Other Side of the Story), and her husband Tony Baines.
"The Quiet Life takes its time to find its feet, but once it gets going, it's very pacy. The dialogue is good, and it's good in terms of the authenticity of its setting. There's an excellent description of a visit to the Maze Prison just outside Belfast and what visitors had to endure there. It was an eye-opener to this reader. I would expect this novel to do very, very well in Northern Ireland."
Patricia Scanlan (Two for Joy, Love and Marriage).
"An exceptionally heartfelt and intelligent examination of punishment, guilt and atonement, with considerable emotional impact."
Rosemary Davidson (ex-BLOOMSBURY, author of The Great Big Glorious Book for Girls).
THE QUIET LIFE
Adrian Millar
Published by Adrian Millar at Smashwords
Copyright 2011 Adrian Millar
Homepage http://www.adrianmillar.ie
Blog http://www.adrianmillar.wordpress.com
Facebook http://www.facebook.com
Smashwords Edition, License Notes
This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you're reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.
Table of Contents
Ten Things You Might Want To Know About The Author
First Chapter of My Next Novel
Chapter 1
Marlene perched her chin on her arched shoulder, then taunted her sister with words that rose and fell like swallows at play, “But how did you just know but?”
“The air!” Kathleen shouted, glaring at her as if to say anyone with an ounce of wit would have known the answer.
From the moment Kathleen had caught George’s scent in Belfast Central Library, she had just known they were destined for each other. Her sense of smell had been the ground of her existence ever since the odour of meconium had assailed her nostrils, obliterating the trauma of the birth canal and the midwife’s slap. Soon she was grabbing unsuspecting feet for a sniff, even those of perfect strangers, as her mother discovered to her disdain on a trip to the Falls Baths. The simplest of rubs was enough to keep her going for days, her hands cupped at her nose inhaling her bouquet. No, whether Marlene liked it or not, Kathleen could tell: everything in her life had brought her to the Astronomy section on that spring Saturday morning for her encounter with her husband-to-be.
Marlene rolled her eyes up to heaven.
Infuriated by her martyr act, Kathleen yelled, “How did you think I’d know? The parting in his hair?”
Marlene protruded her lower lip and nodded repeatedly, intimating that in her professorial opinion the parting in George’s hair was, on balance, a more persuasive explanation for love at first sight than the air. Kathleen saw red.
“It was in the air! I could smell it! I could smell it!” she blurted, retreating to her original position.
The words had no sooner left Kathleen’s mouth than she realised that she had given her sister more ammunition with which to attack her, and Marlene didn’t lose a second. “Uh!” she tooted as if to awaken the Gods, “Dear Lord, what next?” she implored, now shaking her head heavenwards in despair, her hands joined for added effect.
Like a high-rise in an earthquake, Kathleen's face concertinaed, her jaw sliding crossways to reveal smoke-damaged teeth. Assessing the situation, she quickly pulled herself together and broke into exaggerated applause, lavishing her sister with damning praise, “Yeah, definitely, dad’s right, Marlene! You should be on the stage! You missed your vocation alright!” To her delight, Marlene pouted on cue and banged her teacup down on the table with panache, boosting Kathleen’s morale. “See, told you, you’re a natural!” Kathleen lauded her, refusing to let up.
Marlene’s eyes disappeared, amoeba-like, as the compliment wound its way to its intended target. Upon impact, she flung her cup and saucer aside, lowered her head and began sniffing the table like a tracker dog. Pretending not to be paying any heed, Kathleen opened ‘Weddings of the Century’, which George had earlier helped her lift off the library shelf, and fingered the bridal wear in the illustrations in the hope that her delicate movements would not be lost on her sister. Marlene was too busy straining her neck to notice. Frustrated by Kathleen’s apparent lack of reaction to her canine mime, Marlene now added sound. “So it was in the air, was it? Did he fart or what?” she squeaked, holding her snout.
Incensed by Marlene’s crudity, Kathleen got back in the ring and let fly.
“Look, you! Aren’t you the one’s always going on about you being born a Catholic, aren’t you? ‘Catholics are just born Catholics, not like Protestants. It’s not drummed into us, like’. Well, love’s like that. It’s just one of those things. It just happens. You just know! Uh! Not that you’d know much about that though!”
Experience had taught Kathleen that what Marlene had in theatrical prowess was no match for her powers of logical argument, and from the look of fear in Marlene’s eyes she could now see that it was only a matter of time till her sister bowed out. She could literally smell victory as Marlene broke into a sweat in response to a tension in the pit of her stomach that she tried in vain to ignore. She’s right, she’s right, you silly wee shite, she’s right as right can be! The words throbbed in Marlene’s head, but left a sick taste in her mouth that made speech impossible. Chances were love would never be on the cards for her, Marlene thought. Even when it had stared her in the face, she had failed to recognise it – like the boy who had regularly come to sit on the wall of the schoolyard and watch her play handball. She hadn’t even been aware of him until her friends teased her about him, and by the time she had worked up the courage to say hello, he was gone.
Marlene fed her hair through her moist hands like rope as she attempted to steady her nerves, and the fortuitous sight of Kathleen unselfconsciously knotting the end of the tablecloth gave her the burst of vitality she needed. She would give Kathleen a taste of her own medicine. Detesting logical arguments, she topped up on air with a sharp in-take of breath which brought a pink hue to her cheeks, then spat out the words, terrified she would choke on them.
“Catch yourself on, will you, Kathleen? You mean to say falling in love is like being born a Catholic? Sure, then, Protestants would never fall in love, would they, like? Did you not say Georgie boy kicked with his left?”
The horror on Kathleen’s face demonstrated that whatever it was she had said must have made sense but instead of relief, Marlene once more felt fear: Kathleen wouldn’t take it lying down.
Kathleen banged her book shut and knitted her brow. “Oh, give over! You have to have an answer for everything, don’t you? The fact is you’re just jealous! That’s all that ails you!” she thundered, her voice rattling the Venetian blinds.
Marlene hid a smile with her hand in Geisha fashion. Rising to the provocation, Kathleen made up her mind to finish her off, even if she had to go down with her in Kamikaze style. “That’s what’s up your arse! You’ll never get anybody because you wouldn’t part with a fart, you’re that mean!” she exploded, then cringed. She hated stooping to Marlene’s level of insult; victory always felt like defeat. However, her shame at having let herself down was short-lived. As Marlene jumped up from the table screaming, Kathleen already had herself convinced that she had had no choice; Marlene had driven her into a corner and shooting her down was all she could do to prevent her from robbing her of her future.
Marlene scurried like a monkey into the scullery, her limbs knocking off the couch, mantle-piece, bookshelf and door handle on the way. “You leave me alone, you! I’m telling mummy on you when she comes home!” she screeched from the safety of her den.
It came as no surprise to Kathleen to hear Marlene invoke her mother, and she ignored her threat confident that Benny was no match for her father, Frank, on whom she regularly relied in arguments. Besides, she finally had Marlene on the run.
“Destiny,” Kathleen whispered under her breath. “It’s a matter of destiny, not that you’d understand that!” she called out to Marlene who was now scouring the pantry for comfort food. The sudden recollection that somewhere there were crisps that her mother had bought the day before gave Marlene a second wind.
“Oh, so it’s your des-ti-nee, now, is it?” she shouted back into Kathleen, drawing out ‘destiny’ as if to draw blood from her opponent.
“Yep! Now you’re talking!” Kathleen declared triumphantly, turning a blind eye to her sarcasm.
Marlene poked her head through the beads hanging at the entrance to the scullery, lifted her hand to her ear, bent it at the wrist and shook it. “Oh, so, it’s wedding bells, then, is it?” she enquired, expecting, indeed half hoping, that her assumption would be rejected.
“Well, you didn’t think we were going to live in sin now, did you?” Kathleen shot back.
Marlene’s jaw dropped.
“And what are you gaping at?” Kathleen chided her in an effort to dislodge her from the vicinity of the lintel. She was too close for comfort.
Marlene closed her mouth and turned away, more to please herself than to please Kathleen. She tied her hair in a pony-tail with a tea-towel, donned an apron and set about washing the dishes to put some badly needed order on her world. She scrubbed and scrubbed and scrubbed in the hope of erasing the thought from her mind that her sister was set on marriage to someone she had chanced upon that morning in the public library when she could just as easily have been at home getting ready for Confessions.
Kathleen was glad that Marlene hadn’t bothered to respond. She could at last savour her dream in peace and quiet. Gazing out at the flowers in the garden, she saw herself walking up the aisle clutching her father’s arm, the church redolent with the fragrance of lilies and chrysanthemums, the man from the Astronomy section awaiting her at the altar - embalmed. Embalmed? As she frantically plucked the pungent smell of death off her clothes like confetti, her knees trembled and the table shook. She laid her cheek on the cover of her book to iron out her thoughts, but the truth, namely that she was born a widow, remained the furthest thing from her mind in spite of the fact that it had always been clear to those around her that she was drawn to the drama of death from an early age. When her mother had scolded her “Kitty-Coo” for leaving the toilet seat wet, Kathleen would invariably burst into tears and cry out “I miss my granda!” – even though her paternal grandfather had passed away while she was still in her mother’s womb. And it was her Uncle Damien who was the first to observe that whenever she played with Snow White the latter inevitably failed to wake up when the handsome prince plonked his kiss on her lips. Kathleen would proceed to bury her in a wooden pencil-case to the lament of the seven dwarfs, each of whom she played individually, then go into mourning bereft of her appetite for whatever sweets Damien had brought her.
It was her penchant for widowhood, indeed, that explained her adoration of her grandmother who periodically boasted “I buried my man in ’52”, denoting her shameless pride in her endurance as a widow, though some of those who remembered him viewed it, rather, as an expression of her pride in having put up with him for so long. It was from around the time Kathleen was old enough to realise that her grandmother had never held a shovel in her hand, and the latter consequently fell from grace, that Jackie Bouvier-Kennedy conveniently came into the frame and graced her life with her tragic beauty and beautiful tragedy. This period also coincided with Kathleen’s tendency to miss the school bus, leaving her late for class, significantly only on bright mornings (an important detail that was not picked up by the school authorities.) Consequently, she would often find herself obliged to process alongside a bereaved wife as a cortege crawled caterpillar-like to the cemetery beside her school. Then, more often than not, unable to extricate herself without appearing disrespectful, she accompanied the inconsolable widow to the graveside where, fighting back tears, she bid the deceased adieu and discreetly slipped through the railings into the recreation yard, resolving yet again not to wear her heavy coat in fine weather because it slowed her down and left her late for the bus. However, the most obvious indication of Kathleen’s soulful predisposition was that in her married life there was no shortage of times when she wished George dead well before his time. Guilt-ridden, she would typically brush off her outburst with some comment about her short fuse and an assurance that she never meant a word of what she had said, and George, for his own reasons, opted to take her at her word.
George had to be Kathleen’s first and last love so much so that even when she discovered that she had confused astrology with astronomy, and that ignorance had brought her to the wrong bookshelf, this simply confirmed her gut instinct: she and George were meant to be together “till death us do part”. She would have her day of passion in a candlelit church, and the congregation would see her in her finest hour (albeit attired in black). Learning of her designs on George, her brother Johnny commented, “That’s them there lucky stars for you again!” and Kathleen beamed at him deaf to his mordant sarcasm, confirmed in her belief that the God of All Things had brought them together. The only thing she found odd was that Johnny, who hadn’t a romantic bone in his body, should have recognised this. Maybe, just maybe, he too had a poker in the fire, she thought, but she dismissed the idea as quickly as it had appeared. It was too fanciful.
In time it became clear to Kathleen that the Almighty was behind everything, not just her marriage. When, her sole grandchild already well up in years, faced with the carnage of her life, she cried out one morning in an unforgivable moment of weakness, “Why the hell me?” the Man Above quickly poured concrete over the cracks: it was what He had wanted for her. It never entered her head that she might have wanted it herself. Everything was put through the sieve of faith. Her question answered, she pulled back the blankets on her bed, arched her knees, wriggled each of her toes in turn, saying 'This little piggy went to the market, this little piggy stayed at home. This little piggy had bread and butter, this little piggy had none. And this little piggy shouted wee, wee, wee, wee, wee all the way to the barn door', then rose to look for scissors to cut her toenails. George strolled in from the bathroom, his chin and cheeks swaddled in a white towel. “Did you shout something into me?” “No, I didn’t say a word,” she replied. “Jesus, I must be hearing voices! I could have sworn someone said, “Why tell and see?”
Kathleen prised her moist face from the now smudged bride and groom on the book cover. Her panic had to be a result of all the pressure Marlene was putting her under. She smelled George’s scent – a mixture of talc and sweat - emanating from her gloves that lay on the couch by the fireplace and she relaxed again. One sniff of him and she had swooned. His hand had reached out to support her and she had let herself go in his embrace. In that moment George saw his life pass before him and all his heretofore, pat answers were thrown into question as he sensed with every fibre in his body that every step he had ever taken had led her to this spot. (This conviction was later confirmed for him by her candid revelation that it was his scent that had drawn her to him.) He carried the damsel to a nearby alcove where he stroked her cheek until she regained consciousness some five minutes later. (He had considered a chivalrous slap, but, he later told her, he had not wanted to alarm her.) He later claimed that when she had opened her eyes he had seen a lost soul which he resolved to rescue like a knight in shining armour. According to Kathleen, true to his nature as a man, he had failed to grasp things correctly. He had seen his own reflection. George yawned at her drivel.
Molly leapt onto the table and gave Kathleen a start. She felt afraid again: it wouldn’t do if her mother found out about George and her just yet. She flung the cat on the floor, got up from the table and went into the scullery where Marlene stood with her head in the air, holding the bag of crisps over her nose and mouth like an oxygen mask. She needed to knock her out. Molly fled under the sideboard.
“If you open your beak to mum, I swear to God I’ll get you with the gullet knife in your sleep!” she threatened her.
Marlene choked and coughed hysterically as Molly shrieked in her stead.
That evening Marlene protested to her mother that what had shocked her about Kathleen’s resolve was not at all the fact that George was a Protestant but the fact that Kathleen was going to marry a man, whom she had only just met, because he smelled nice. “When will you ever learn to turn a deaf ear and a blind eye?” her mother dismissed her protestation. Marlene shrugged her hips at her mother’s complacency, unaware that Benny had her eye on the bigger picture and the possibility of ridding herself of a problem daughter.
As darkness fell, Marlene crept into bed and pulled the blankets tight up around her neck. She knew Kathleen well enough to take no chances.
*******
It was their first date, and Kathleen’s aunt Maura, who had always been like a mother to her, had offered her the use of her front parlour. “There’s no point in doing it up against an alley wall or on the back of a lorry,” she had frequently counselled her niece. “If you’re gonna do it, you have to do it in style.” “Ambience”, she confided in Kathleen, “was crucial”, blushing as she let slip that it was “everything”. ‘Ambience’ sounded French, and that was a good enough reason for Kathleen to accept her aunt’s offer.
Sandwiched on the settee, Kathleen was aware of her heart thumping with fear as George’s belt pressed into her groin and their bodies kissed to the tinkle of cardigan buttons rubbing together. She struggled to release an arm from under him to dim the gas lamp purposefully left on the table for the occasion. Stretching backwards, she placed her hand on the switch, whereupon a halo, which could just have easily have been the effect of the lampshade, caught her attention on the ceiling and the Blessed Virgin appeared in her full regalia. It was the first apparition outside the privacy of Kathleen’s bathroom, where she was a regular visitor, and Kathleen immediately felt guilty because she had failed to mention George to her on her last visit.
“Casleen, my schild, You are going to regret,” the Virgin murmured in her heavy Lourdes accent as she fiddled anxiously with the rosary beads that hung from her royal blue girdle. Her divination, which would prove eerily correct, had come too late to save Kathleen from temptation – her fingers turned the switch full circle and Our Lady was assumed heavenwards.
Kathleen fell into a bewitching darkness. Her thighs tightened as a wave of excitement washed in around her bay area where his thing nested. She groped for his head, and scrambled to find his lips to kill the desire that now possessed her. George’s body jerked at the hips and he emitted a deep sigh. She had stuck her finger in his left eye. Instinctively, she covered his mouth for fear that her mother, two streets away, would hear him, then kissed his turnip gasp. Writhing, he tried to get her in focus, as his left hand fumbled with his zip. From the moment the light had gone out, he was conscious that he was in with a chance. He longed to lie it on her flesh. That would be enough for the first night. As he searched for her tummy, he was suddenly overcome with regret that he hadn’t come across this lucky break sooner. It should have been love at first sight, glorious like first light which he had witnessed once over Belfast Lough on the Twelfth after a night of binge-drinking, but it was not that. Love at first sight had passed him by over and over again on his way to Sunday service in the form of Kathleen making her way back from Mass only a few feet away. His thoughts had been elsewhere. “Show your father a bit of respect!” “Do as you’re told!” “You’ll never know how much we’ve loved you.” As he finally touched down on her soft belly, his regret turned to anger at his parents for depriving him of the pleasure that now charged his body. He would shake off his parents and his past as he had shaken off his depression in order to be there for Kathleen. With that thought in mind he climaxed. By the time he had buttoned up his cardigan he was already planning their next date.
Kathleen was no stranger to love at first sight, if indirectly. Her father would periodically gather his children – Kathleen, Marlene, Nicholas and Johnny in descending order - on the settee for the story of his first date with their mother after he had spotted her the previous week on the dance-floor and fallen in love with his “Armagh apple”. Having gone to meet her by the main gates of the Royal Victoria Hospital, she was not to be seen. Crestfallen, he had just got back on a bus to return home when he spied her standing by the side-entrance of the hospital. There had been a mix-up. He jumped off the bus again, and without bothering to ask for his money back, ran across the road to her. “How different my life would have been had I not got back off that bus and met your mother!” he would excitedly regale his audience. As Kathleen prepared herself for the punch-line, she would inevitably feel butterflies in her tummy. “For one thing,” he would always say, stating the obvious to the now weary faces, “none of you would be here now.” The obvious confused her. Was he excited because he had met the woman of his dreams or was it because he imagined a life where none of them existed? The very thought that he might wish she never existed frightened her all the more given that Marlene constantly narked at her about how he worshipped the ground she walked on. The day it struck her that he himself probably didn’t know the cause of his excitement, her fear vanished only to turn up in the form of a suitcase that she hid under her bed in case of an emergency. It was shortly after that that she decided there was only one way of getting on top of her anxiety - she would get out from under him. George was the perfect ticket.
As she watched George button up, Kathleen determined to ask her aunt if they could borrow her parlour another evening the following week. He was too good to be true. She couldn’t let him slip through her fingers, though she was not about to let him slip in. He would have to wait before she let him go the whole way. She got up off the settee and brushed herself down. Her aunt had told her to knock on the kitchen door when she was through and she would get some Milo ready for them, but Kathleen now had other plans. She felt an inexplicable urge to have him walk her home and kiss her goodnight up against McGovern’s gable wall just within sight of her home. She stood George in the porch and returned to the kitchen to inform her aunt that they had to be off because it was getting dark and George had to be careful going through the predominantly Catholic streets. Aunt Maura pulled a long face, but it was the smell of Milo emanating from the kitchen that forced Kathleen to recognise what she already knew – Aunt Maura had eagerly been awaiting an account of the ‘action’ in the parlour to brighten up a life strong on atmosphere but weak on concretes. Only Kathleen’s promise to report back the following week softened the blow for Maura and eased Kathleen’s conscience.
However smitten Kathleen was, she explained to George on their second date that he would have to do all the running. It was a woman’s prerogative to be chased, and she didn’t want to give him the wrong message. His pride getting the better of him, George decided that his younger brother Fred, who was in George’s street book-club, would do some of the running for him, delivering messages between them. Kathleen accepted the arrangement.
Three weeks later, and six dates under their belts, she sat George down by the back of the Orchid and brought him up to speed: an engagement ring and a further six months trial would do the trick in her book. The big news knocked him for six - he had not been thinking beyond Fanny and Zoe, the reading material for that coming Sunday - but delighted Fred who already had had his fill of acting as conduit. Noticing George turn pale, Kathleen assured him that she would be there for him if he made the effort. George wondered had he missed something - it had all happened so fast. He never suspected that she was in a hurry because she was afraid that she might lose interest. Indeed, she did not suspect as much herself.
George slept on it and still woke up in two minds regarding Kathleen’s ultimatum. He swung like a pendulum, and got the jitters with the result that everything he ate passed through him like water. To complicate matters, however much he wished otherwise, his appetite would not desert him. In the end, the decision was taken out of his hands: circumstances dictated that he jump for the simple reason that there was no other way to stem the flow. Having jumped, he never strayed, remaining faithful to his initial belief that he was and was not going to go through with it, with the result that he was forever leaving her and not leaving her from one day to the next. His confusion formed the bedrock of his commitment. It got him up in the morning and knocked him out, jaded, at night, for the most part in his prison cell. The only change was that in due course his stomach cramps became as regular as her period and were particularly bad during her pregnancies.
When George jumped, Kathleen caught hold of him by the hand and presented him with a bottle of Kaolin & Morphine for ‘the runs’ before leading him off to the jeweller’s to choose the engagement ring. He requested more time to get the money together but she saw through his ploy and lent him a tenner that her mother had given her for unexpected eventualities. Like a lamb to the slaughter, he stepped up into the shop in one of his ‘I’m not going to go through with it’ moments. Her future sparkling before her eyes, Kathleen took up the rear by the door. He would cast up to her about how as she stood there she had said that a double diamond would “do the trick.” She denied the allegation time and again, adding that it hardly mattered as it was only a figure of speech. For George, her denial simply served to prove his point, namely that he had been tricked all along. He fancied her and all of that, he later told his drinking mates, but she had pulled every trick in the book to get him to the altar.
In time it became evident that Kathleen was infected by her father’s doubt. Within a few months of buying the ring, she began to labour over how she had let herself be taken in by that first kiss with George when she had sensed such a lack of commitment in him. But she would go through with it. Soon the memory of how his lips had caressed hers that first night evaporated like hot water off dishes. A mere five years later, all she could recall was that he had turned up because he had a bet on with his mates in the book-club that he would go through with a date with “a wee Catholic from Clonard.” Anyway, she sometimes pondered, alone in her bed, whether this was a trick of memory or not, it was obvious that his heart had never been in it all along. Bar the passion she had felt for him in the library, their relationship had always lacked an initial spark, and it was all his fault. Over the years, of course she never revealed this to her children, Rosy and Jack, because, she told herself, that would only turn them against him, and George already had enough on his plate with a fifteen-year sentence for “crashing the lights”. However, the reality was that the children knew everything, even the real reason why their father was doing time. It was never what Kathleen said, so much as what she didn’t say, which gave her away, though George was often the last to know.
********
It was Kathleen’s big day. With the exception of the best man, Fred, George’s family boycotted the proceedings on religious grounds, unhappy about him marrying into the Church of the anti-Christ. Nonetheless, convinced that Kathleen’s family would put their absence down to Protestant bigotry rather than to conscientious objection, George’s father, Alistair Lackey, offered to put the Lackey-Dunne wedding over. The Dunnes wouldn’t hear of it. They knew exactly what the Lackeys were at; they were out to embarrass them with an offer that was, Frank had to admit, hard to refuse. Friends and relatives rallied around, pouring into the Dunnes’ home on a daily basis to commiserate with the latest victims of Protestant sectarianism, which was on the rise in the wake of Catholics’ calls for civil rights for British citizens. The Lackeys were showing their true colours. However, Benny, with largesse to boot, defended her future in-laws, “That’s just the way they’re brought up. There’s no point in gloating,” she told her sympathisers. Her magnanimity was the talk of the road, although there were those in the know who had a suspicion that Benny was being big about it because she was relieved at being able to marry off a daughter with a history. The world and their mother knew that the one person who wouldn’t be invited to the wedding would be Padraig Corr from the lower estate. And anybody could tell you that Protestants were less likely to kick up a fuss about ‘damaged goods’ because they didn’t know what sin was, unlike Catholics. They were also in no doubt that Benny was secretly pleased that there would be virtually no Lackeys at the wedding because it was less likely that Kathleen’s story would get out. The irony that Benny trusted her own even less than she trusted Protestants was totally lost on them, as was the irony of their admission that Catholics knew all about sin. As for Frank, the gossip was that he was delighted to save on the guests, an added pleasure being that they were “the other sort”.
When Kathleen broke down in tears a month before the wedding because her father had hinted that being a man of few words he would rather give the wedding speech a miss, this gave Benny the opportunity to inform Kathleen that she would completely understand if she decided not to go through with it as George was moving too fast, and Kathleen patently needed time to think. Pretending that her mother had hit the nail on the head, Kathleen threw her arms around her and assured her that she was fine - it was just that all the organising was getting in on top of her. Benny could never have imagined that what had prompted Kathleen’s tears was her fear of having sex on her wedding night.
The wedding ceremony passed off peacefully, but not without incident. Frank put the “boo-boos” down to a case of wedding nerves, but it confirmed for Benny what she wanted to believe - the whole mixed marriage thing was too much for Kathleen. She even believed the rumours about how forgiving she was in relation to her future in-laws, while she berated Frank for the obvious pleasure he took in not having to fork out money for Protestants. She argued that her people were from close to the Border so the whole Protestant thing had never been an issue, unlike the way it was for the ones from Belfast. Besides, her parents had been supporters of the Northern Ireland Labour Party, so there was none of the republican thing in her blood with the result that they had nothing against Protestants. Frank found it hard to disagree with her analysis; Belfast had indeed a history of Protestant pogroms against Catholics that had left its mark, but he did argue in his defence that he had bent over backwards to please them, even offering to have the Lackeys collected and brought to the church at his expense.
The wedding incident occurred at the exchange of marriage vows.
“Please say after me, ‘I, Kathleen, take you, George, to be my lawful wedded husband,” Fr. Cunningham instructed Kathleen.
“I, George, take you ..., uh, I, I, I,” Kathleen stuttered.
The congregation, until then half asleep, cocked their ears. George giggled nervously but Kathleen’s mistake sent a shudder down Fred’s back. He could hear his mother bellow, “See, I told you so! They want to take us over!” His parents were right - Kathleen wore the trousers and she would make George into one of their own. He had to do something to calm the voice in his head that beat like a Lambeg drum, but before he had a chance to do anything, Fr. Cunningham smiled, and repeated the words as if enunciating them for the first time. Fred looked at Kathleen who waited as long as she could before speaking in the full knowledge that she still wasn’t ready.
“I, Kathleen, take you,…..” She blanked. His name - what’s his name? Jesus, somebody… “I, I….,” the words trickled to a stop.
The congregation shuffled their feet, George went the colour of Kathleen’s dress, and Benny took a fit of coughing, setting off a wave of spluttering and nose-blowing the length and breadth of St. Paul’s. Fred stepped in.
“Em, reverend, cud ye, take it one word at a time, cud ye?” he asked as politely as he could make it.
“No, it’s alright. I’ll be alright. Just give me a second!” Kathleen said, cutting across the priest who had opened his mouth to speak. She clasped her hands together and shook them like a child with a dice, as if the outcome she needed could be guaranteed by the intensity of her movement. The words rolled off her tongue, tumbling out so fast as to be almost indecipherable to the congregation. Benny bit her lip, not knowing whether to laugh or cry, and pulled the net on her hat further down over her eyes. It was all down to George now.
“Please repeat after me, ‘I, George, take you, Kathleen, to be my lawful wedded wife’,” the priest proceeded, easing each neatly formed word out like bubbles so as to avoid any further glitches.
“I, George, take you Kathleen to be my loyal wedded wife.”
The congregation chuckled. Their suspicions had been confirmed - George had only one goal and that was to make of Kathleen a loyal subject. Unable to look George in the eye, Fr. Cunningham now read the words off the page. Wondering what the commotion behind him was all about, and why the priest was making him repeat himself, George obliged, this time without a hitch.
The celebrant, who until the Consecration hadn’t put a foot wrong, finally came a cropper himself, probably, Benny surmised, as a result of all the pressure. Raising the host high above his head to recite ‘Behold the Lamb of God!’ he faltered. “Behold the leg of lamb!” he intoned. While those who were awake fought back their desire to giggle, Benny didn’t bat an eyelid, satisfied that no matter what went wrong now, it was too late; Kathleen was well and truly off her hands.
Before the ceremony had ended, rumour had it in parts of North Belfast that a Catholic woman had led an innocent, God-fearing Protestant up the garden path into the arms of the Pope, and that the best man had sold his brother down the river.
Having an aversion to covering her head ever since she was little, Kathleen was delighted to reach the bridal suite that night if only in order to remove her veil. As she unpinned it a smoky smell caught her nostrils. The veil was singed. She realised that she must have almost gone up in flames as she signed the register on the altar. She tossed it aside, raised her head and shook her ringlets free, her train taking up the rhythm in turn, lending the appearance of a swan shaking off water. For those few seconds she had forgotten about her fear of doing it with George who hovered behind her.
********
Kathleen wolfed down the nerve tablets she had pinched from her mother’s private cache that she kept hidden out of Frank’s sight in her packet of Dr. Whyte’s, and bared her all in the light that shone in from the corridor. She gripped George for dire life where it mattered and he felt appropriately embarrassed. She had hoped that he might settle for that, but he touched and tickled her, then found her entry point. She felt again the pain down under which had haunted her since the day Benny had revealed to Mrs. Carlin from across the street how excruciating it was when ‘himself’ lay on top of her of a Sunday night. As intended, Benny’s dispatch had lodged like a bullet in Kathleen’s groin as she sat between them on the floor reading the Four Marys.
As the tablets took effect, Kathleen’s pain subsided and George played himself out until he fell flat on his face by which time Kathleen had already sunken into a deep sleep where she dreamed of missing the train back to Belfast. The bear that got the honey, George disappeared without a trace into the great beyond where they failed to find him till first light when he had to be smoked out, the smell of sausages and bacon from the kitchen below their room bringing him slowly to his feet.
When Kathleen awoke, she made her way to the dining-room, leaving George to shower before he came down. In the reception area, she smelled the chlorine from the pool off to her right and felt, it seemed to her for no good reason, agitated. Although she had allowed herself plenty of time, her pace gathered speed in spite of herself. She sat down to breakfast with thoughts of getting home to Belfast on her mind, for the idea of six more nights of sex put the fear of God into her.
On day three, as if an answer to prayer, the threat of a rail strike persuaded George to cut the honeymoon short and they made their way to the bus. He returned to Belfast with left over condoms for his mates, which he duly distributed from a brown paper bag he hid on top of the wardrobe, for a price. He acknowledged to his friends that he had enjoyed himself on his honeymoon, but his enjoyment had left Kathleen feeling he had married her for lust, not love.
The lustful George signed on the dole within days of returning to Belfast from his honeymoon. He would never work another day in his life. “What kind of a maaan are you?” Kathleen mocked him. George complained to her that she was like her mother – she had married for security, a need that blinded her to all the other ways he was there for her. Her “high security marriage”, as he liked to refer to it, annoyed him more than anything else in the world, even more than Rangers losing to Celtic, although in the case of the latter he was known to conceal his anger better to keep in with his republican buddies. She hemmed him in on all sides. In time, he was forced to do the weekly shop with her, and was only allowed to leave the house after one o’ clock on weekdays, for that way the neighbours might take him for a bin-man back from his collection rather than the good-for-nothing layabout that he was. “Marriage isn’t a free ride,” she hollered on occasion. “It’s about goals, and God knows you ought to know enough about them, for you’re never done watching that football on that bloody box!” “I’ll have my day in Court,” she once screamed at him with all the self-pity she could muster. George replied that she might have it sooner than she thought if she kept on at him, but he didn’t mean it. When she continued to moan at him, he told her that he would never recognise the court, and anyway she would probably drive him to his grave first and succeed where his loyalist brethren had failed.
The only ‘positive’ for George in their deteriorating relationship was that Kathleen’s preoccupation with her ‘high security marriage’ gave him something to moan about, thus keeping their lines of communication open and leaving him with what he described to his friends, whenever he was permitted to meet them, as a warm feeling for Kathleen. Meanwhile, Kathleen, in her wisdom, felt appreciated because of all his complaining on her account. Arguing was therapeutic and, as a result, they argued for hours, and, later, for years on end. It kept themselves, their neighbours, and more rarely the prison wardens entertained. It was, however, ‘book-keeping’ that really did it for Kathleen. Before their first anniversary, she was already making entries in her ledger in red biro, listing all her woes. She wrote at it feverishly, never happier in her early married life than at such moments. He got out of the wrong side of the bed today. Sitting in there grouching! The lazy bastard left his monks on the floor. Bouncing, they were. And used up the last of the milk for his Cornflakes and didn’t even bother his ass to go down to the shop for more. Hasn’t washed himself for a week. What he needs is a good kick up the arse! You’d think his mother would have given him one long ago, but sure they’re as bad. What did I ever see in him? As long as he gets his oats. Try as he might, George could never find where she hid it. Once, in a fit of rage, she threatened to have it read out at her funeral Mass, and George, who never attended church, offered to serve as a reader at the “celebration”.
Shortly after their second anniversary Kathleen expanded her astrology portfolio and took a shine to reading tea. She longed for a child to replace the one that she had lost. (Kevin was born premature, and her grandmother, who had taken him home to rear him, returned Benny’s cabinet drawer which had served as a cot.) It wasn’t long until Kathleen discovered children in foetal positions on the inside of her cup, though sometimes she swallowed an arm or a leg. They were always girls. Her consumption of tea had the added effect of a badly needed caffeine kick six times a day, which, crossing her heart the Playtex way, she regularly denied to George was her objective.
At night she relied on her dreams for solace. Her bed was her cinema - whatever she could conjure up on the white sheet. She directed, produced, and played all the parts. Once she flew over houses, each breath carrying her ever higher over the snow-covered countryside. She was freed. She felt the air flow through her body, and then a sudden surge of pee that startled her out of her sleep. Trance-like she leapt out of bed and made a dash for the bathroom, holding her head as she strove to make the feeling of freedom last on the loo. She had to know her destiny. Eyes still closed, she wiped herself and managed to bundle herself into bed where, now half-awake, she wrapped the sheet tight around her flesh in an attempt to re-ignite her future. She took off momentarily again only to come down to earth with a bang as the odour of sour pee drifted into the hall and the invigilator brushed up against her. George turned over. She put her hand on his penis, but it was lifeless: male hormonal shutdown. The child would have to wait.
Another night, she saw her father coming towards her, his open nightshirt revealing his hairy chest. He lifted her up in his arms and she had just begun to count his hairs like sheep when Aunt Maura appeared out of nowhere to announce that Frank had just sailed out into the deep blue sea on a “sheep”. Kathleen burst out laughing for she had always found Maura that wee bit grand and gaily ran over to the water’s edge to see her father off, but his ship sank in the high winds from the vent above her bed, and she woke up in a sweat face to face with George who was scowling at her. Her laughter had woken him up. She rolled over on her sodden pillow. Was it grief, or was it fear that had exuded through her pores, she wondered? In an effort to find out, she rubbed her face with her finger and daubed it like a dealer on the tip of her tongue. It tasted of spice, some foreign land, unchartered territory. It was fear.
“Fra!” she cried out one night in bed.
“And who is Fra?” George asked, raising himself up on his elbows.
“The boiler man,” she answered in her sleep.
Next morning at breakfast, feigning jealousy, George asked who Fra the boiler man was.
“Who? What? Boiler man? What boiler man?” she replied.
“The one you were sleeping with,” said George, half joking.
“I don’t know any boiler man! What boiler do I have to get checked anyway?”
George regretted his question, realising from the heaviness in his chest that his jealousy was for real. Was there something she hadn’t told him? Kathleen, who normally would have stood her ground to the point of arguing that a black crow was white, threw her breakfast bowl in the sink and nipped offside. It was exactly the conclusive proof he needed, but he watched her go. He didn’t want to know who Fra was.
Chapter 2
“And what are you going to be when you grow up?” uncle Alexander asked him. George was too busy being a spinning-top to answer. He tipped over on to the card-table which collapsed with him on to the floor.
“Oops! Careful!” Alexander exhorted after the fact in the hope of minimising the expected wailing.
“I meant it! I meant it!” exclaimed George, hiding his sense of failure from himself.
“You wanna watch it but!” Alexander admonished him with a gentle tap on the crown of his head.
George elbowed Alexander’s leg and marched off to the opposite side of the room.
“Well, wee man, what’ll you be?” Alexander persisted as George took off again and again on a long, narrow stretch of mat that served as a runway. “Thunderbirds! Thunderbirds!” George sang over and over as the planes departed. Alexander gave up waiting on an answer, picked up a pack of playing cards and began placing them in clock formation on the table.
“I wanna be a fireman. No, no, a soldier,” said George, realising that he was about to lose Alexander’s attention.
“A soldier?”
“No, I wanna be a B-Special actually.”
“Hello, hello, hello! And what do we have here then?” said Alexander bringing his arms behind his back like a British bobby. “Fenians at it again, are they, young sir?”
“Actually, could I be a pop star, uncle Alex?”
Alexander burst out laughing. “Oh, a pop star, ac-chi-ly,” he enunciated, mocking his nephew. “You know what? You’ll never end up in Purdysbyrne, that’s for sure, for you never stop changing your mind, now, do you?”
The reference to Belfast’s leading psychiatric hospital was lost on George, but he blushed nonetheless.
“Ach, but, sure, you can be whatever you want, son, so you can,” Alexander added, noticing the child’s embarrassment.
George dropped to his knees and picked up a batman car. He hated the way adults always said one thing but meant another. He could tell that Alexander was just trying to be nice. He lifted the batmobile into the air and glided it by to the sound of an engine that he dragged out in order to prevent Alexander from lying any further. Alexander returned to his card game.
“I’m batman!” George said defiantly as the car swooped onto the carpet and slowed to a stand-still. “Uncle Alexander, can you get me a cowboy outfit for when I’m twelve?” he asked, annoyed at Uncle Alexander’s short span of attention.
“Whatever you want, son,” Alexander fobbed him off, the sight of the wild ehorse now galloping past him exhausting him.
George had always believed that he could be anything he wanted. He was already a businessman at weekends when he went from door to door selling firewood. At Christmas it was the holly branches, and the ones with the berries were an extra two pennies. His parents were enthralled by his sense of initiative and expected he would go far. He was their little dreamer. On weekdays, though, their dreamer would come to in class to the tittering of the “eejits” that shared the better part of his day with him. T+llernhere was nobody at home, the lights were out, that’s how the teacher put it as he called him up for another whack of the strap. George was in a world of his own. It was safer there where he could be whatever he wanted because he had already sensed that he could never fill his father’s shoes and love his mother.
“Uncle Alexander, are you going now?” George piped up as Alexander sneaked off-side.
“No,” Alexander lied. “Why? Do you want rid of me or something?” he added to throw him off his tracks.
George blushed. Alexander had meant his question as a joke, but George’s red face suggested he had hit upon the truth.
That was another thing George didn’t like about adults – they knew what he was thinking even before he did.
“Oh, here, granny told me to give you this,” said Alexander, taking a lucky bag from his pocket.
George snatched it from him as if his life depended on it. He could always count on his granny, whatever about his parents. He tore it open, and its contents went flying across the floor. A Tom and Jerry card landed at Alexander’s feet and he sighed as he picked it up and handed it back.
“Here, she said to give you this as well because she won’t see you on Saturday because she and uncle Barney are off on a bus-run to Antrim.”
Alexander slipped him two bob, then turned on his heels, relieved to be leaving the chaos of George’s world behind.
*******
Another thing George came to hate along with the way adults lied and read minds was the way they used big words, like “Catholics” and “bastards”. He awoke one morning to find his parents at the front door, neighbours milling around, a smell of smoke, and talk of “Taigs”. His mother was centre stage.
“Sure them Cath’lics get more here than they’d ever get in the South in a month of Sundays, and them’uns breed like rabbits into the bargain.”
The rabbits must have been in the cabbage patch again, he thought. Cath’lics – are they the ones with the long, floppy ears, he wondered?
“Aye, tell us about it!” said a woman with a black and white scarf on her head. Her man stood beside her with peeked cap and a patch over his left eye. George had never seen them before but recognised them immediately; Captain Pugwash and his second in command.
“You go out of your way to please them,” George’s mother continued, waving in the direction of the Falls Road, “and then this is what they do to ye, running amok in our streets and putting law-abiding citizens out of their homes in the middle of the night. Sure, we’re givin’ them jobs in all them there big factories,” she waved her hand over her left shoulder as if she were thumbing a lift in the direction of the Springfield, “and now what do they want? One Man One Vote! Did you ever hear the likes in all your life? Like, do you see our ones out marching? And they’ve every bit as right! No, I’m telling yous, there’s no call for yon!”
“What time do you make it there, big lad?” George’s father asked, spotting him behind them on the stairs.
George rubbed his eyes and squinted as he studied its face. His father had got it for him at the start of the summer holidays on a day-trip to Bangor. It was different from all the others he had bought him which he kept on a shelf in the wardrobe – it had ‘waterproof’ stamped on the back of it and it had made bath-time something to look forward to.
“Ten twenty,” said George, pleased as punch.
“And what in the name of God are you doing sitting there in your pyjamas at this hour of the day? Get away up them stairs and get dressed before I skin you alive!” his mother scolded him. His father winked, and George took this as a signal that he could bide his time.
“There’s no way they’ll ever get us out of here,” she continued, turning her back on George. “No, not a chance! There’s just no bloody way we’ll give up our home for a pack of wee bastards who can’t see the trees for the woods.”
“Mummy, what’s a bastard?”
“A Ca’h’lic,” came her unequivocal reply.
He found himself wondering if he could become one when he left home; he liked the idea of hanging out in the woods near Napoleon’s Nose. The one thing he didn’t want to be when he grew up was an adult.
********
As Belfast burned, George was a regular at his grandmother’s. He was often warmed in her two up, two down of a summer’s evening, wringing the light out of the stretch in the day, darkness taking its time, and hers, as she slowly faded before him. Over a wee sup of tea she piled her love high for him upon a tea-plate that she filled up with biscuits and fresh cream cake whenever she could. “You’re in your granny’s!” she would say to him, laughing at herself. The man of the house, he felt at home. Not even the rioting in the streets could keep him from her door.
One afternoon the smoke was still rising from the neighbouring streets when he had made his way around to her. “See them’uns! See them’uns!” she began. The mention of ‘them’uns’ meant he was in for the long haul and he settled back into the armchair. “We’re Prodasins - for God and Ulster, son. But them’uns, them Taigs over the way, they’re layabouts,” she proclaimed. When she said ‘Protestants’ her upper lip curled up and for a split second it would appear to George that it was Protestants she hated, though he knew nothing could be further from the truth. Thanks to her, he knew he came from good loyalist stock; it was not that she ever said much about loyalists themselves but it was what she had to say about ‘them’uns’ that convinced him of this.